The Battle-field.

Auckland Star, Volume XXVII, Issue 156, 4 July 1896, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Battle-field.

.SokE Incidents.

In the now number of • Harper's Magazine* Mr Poultney Bigelow continues, his attractive sketches of the German struggle for liberby. Dealing with bhe babble of Leipzig, which ended disastrously for bhe French, he gives, some incidents of a typo nob usually mentioned in the regular histories. . Napoleon (he says) lost aboub 15,000 in killed, 30,000 wounded, 15,000 prisoners, to say nothing of 300 cannon and 900 ammunition carts. Think of lome 100,000 dead and dying massed in heap* in and about this little university town of Leipzig ! They were cared for as well aa mighb be by simple Christian citizens, bub the best they could do was wholly inadequate. On the seventh day after bhe babble the peasants still bore from the fields the mutilated bodies of living pabriots who had lain neglected where they bad fallen. The bouses of Leipzig were crammed full of eick and wounded, bub many | Leipzigs would have tailed to hold the thousands whose blood was soaking the fields for many miles around* Pestilence could nob fail co • come in bhe wake of so greab slaughter, and disease hurried away thousands whose wounds mighb else have proved bub a Bhorb inconvenience. Friend and enemy fared equally so far as misery waa concerned, and thousands of French wounded begged to be taken prisoners if only thab they mighb escape starvation. And yeb this babble was fought in bhe most highly cultivated parb of all Germany—in the one place where large masses of feroops mighb with reason have been expecbed bo receive rapid and abundant supplies of food. Friendly Foes. We have before us looters of participants giving touching accounts of details rarely noted by history. On bhe morning of bhe 17th, for insbance, Prussian; (Mecklenburg) officers wenb bo do what bhey coold for the French wounded locked up in bhe church and town hall of Schkeuditz, near which the Jiardesb of Bluchers fighting had been. Here was seen a Prussian lieutenant feeding beef brobh bo a French captain, whose face had been nearly cub to pieces. 'Ib was touching,' says one narrabor, *to see bow grateful bhe French were for our little acts of kindness, and how fortunate they counted themselves for having fallen into our hands rather than into those of the Cossacks. Nob a single Frenchman had been robbed of his purse or his watch. Indeed, the confidence in us was so greab thab a captured colonel of the Guard Marine Infantry, having heard that Ney had givenup the battle as lost, wrote in a Prussian officer's pocket-book the address of a friend in Paris, adding thab the Prussians would soon be there without doubfc.'

This .is a pleasanb contrast to the plundering of the French after Jena.